RE: non-authoritative syntaxes for fragment identifiers

I figured out that by 'AWWW', you meant http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/,
which says:

# Parties that draw conclusions about the interpretation of a
# fragment identifier based solely on a syntactic analysis of
# all or part of a URI do so at their own risk; such interpretations
# are not authoritative because they are not licensed by specification.

AWWW has chosen to note that those who use something
non-standard do so 'at their own risk'. In this case,
the 'something non-standard' is 'interpretation of
a fragment identifier based solely on a syntactic
analysis of all or part of a URI'.  But in general,
those who use something non-standard do so 'at their
own risk'.

I think the wording in RFC 2396bis is fine, and that the
problem is with AWWW's wording. "at their own risk" is
short for "using non-standard behavior, standards don't
say what should happen, etc".

> although in some cases Internet media types owners may not
>  need/want to define a syntax, content owners may want to address
>  fragments of content, and have to define non-authoritative syntaxes.

But this isn't up to content owners. URIs are used for
communication from a reference sender ("hey, I want
you to look at URI blah blah fragment blah blah") 
to a reference receiver ("thanks, got it, I'll get that URI and
look up the fragment").
The reference sender needs to rely on a standard interpretation
of URIs and fragments to have any assurance that the reference
receiver will know what is meant. Having some private convention
that some receivers know and others don't just means that you're
relying on some out-of-band information, and the identifier isn't
really "U", you just have some other kind of Resource Identifier.

# in the future, it may be beneficial to establish common conventions 
# for addressing fragments consistently across multiple representations
# of a content.

Such proposals then should be reviewed as Proposed Standards
to update RFC2396bis.

# Indeed at the moment, very few Internet media types have defined a
# syntax for fragment identifiers.

It's certainly feasible to update media type registrations to
include this information (e.g., RFC3778 added fragment syntax
when updating a registered media type).

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Friday, 3 September 2004 17:02:02 UTC